Billionaire Elon Musk only scheduled meetings with Republicans for his first visit to the U.S. Capitol since becoming the CEO of Twitter last week.
Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Ky., House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Jan. 26, but he didn’t schedule any meetings with Congressional Democrats. While Musk did tweet about meeting with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, during the visit, their encounter was only a chance meeting while walking the halls of Congress, Jeffries’ staff told Politico.
“Just met with [McCarthy] & [Jeffries] to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties,” Musk wrote last week.
Musk’s affinity for Republicans grew steadily throughout 2022, going so far as to endorse the party’s candidates in the midterm elections. He said he voted Republican for the first time in his life in a Texas special election last summer.
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Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s visit to Congress.
Musk’s most recent boon to Republicans has been the release of troves of internal Twitter documents detailing the company’s censorship efforts. The release has focused on former Twitter executives’ decision to censor New York Post reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.
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Multiple former Twitter executives are scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 8, and the documents Musk released will likely be critical to the questioning.
The documents revealed that multiple high-level Twitter executives eventually agreed to emergency moderation measures to stop the spread of the Hunter Biden story, even though many of them were worried they had little justification to employ such measures.
One revealing email depicted former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth apparently claiming that though “the facts remain unclear” on whether the New York Post story could be stifled, he encouraged staff to muzzle it in light of the “lessons of 2016.”
Musk fired the Twitter executives responsible for censoring the laptop story soon after taking over the company in November. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s chief censor, was among those fired after documents showed she oversaw the effort to quash the Post’s story.
While Gadde is a likely candidate for the February 8 hearing, the Oversight Committee has yet to identify its scheduled witnesses.
Fox News’ Gabriel Hayes contributed to this report.